Meanwhile, in Washington DC, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announces $420 million in new funding for Open RAN
Vodafone and Nokia announced that they successfully completed of an Open RAN trial, working with chip-maker Arm and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). They used Nokia’s anyRAN approach in the trial to demo an end-to-end Layer 3 (L3) data call. The trial ran at the vendor’s Open RAN Innovation Center in Dallas, Texas.
The test platform used Ampere – Arm-based general-purpose processors – an HPE ProLiant RL300 server, plus Nokia’s Layer 1 (L1) accelerator, RAN software and 5G SA Compact Mobility Unit (CMU) Core.
The trial took place over-the-air with Nokia’s AirScale massive MIMO radios on the n78 spectrum band (3.5 GHz band). The Finnish vendor’s Nokia’s MantaRay NM network management system provided a consolidated network view for monitoring and management.
Diverse suppliers
During the demonstration, data calls were conducted using commercial user devices. According to Nokia, the trial shows that Arm Neoverse-based processors on HPE servers within the Nokia anyRAN approach can support diverse suppliers and the efficiency of the latest silicon technology for Open RAN.
Francisco Martin, Head of Open RAN at Vodafone, said,“Vodafone is dedicated to supporting the development and adoption of Open RAN platforms by fostering a diverse ecosystem of silicon solutions.
“The approach offers numerous benefits, including increased choice, enhanced energy efficiency, higher network capacity, and improved performance in wireless networks. We are excited to collaborate with Nokia, Arm, and HPE in this live demonstration, and the initial results have been promising, paving the way for future commercialization.”
And obviously, not only for Vodafone, which chose to carry out the trial in the US.
Developments in Washington
And on that note, the US’ National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced a further investment of $420 million (€390.2 million) for its Wireless Innovation Fund. It has already awarded more than $140 million across 17 projects in its first round of funding.
Assuming the second round of funding is fully allocated, that will still leave the NTIA with close to $1 billion for future investment.
This second round funding is to related to the development of new radio units. There are two categories available for those wishing to apply.
In the first, radio suppliers and operators must partner to develop commercially viable, open radio units. The NTIA said it will award between $25 million and $45 million per project in this category.